Sheriffs’ delight

While local officials cash in, convicts lose out

EVEN in a country with the world's highest incarceration rate, Louisiana is extreme. The state imprisons 26% more people, on a per-capita basis, than the next-strictest state, Mississippi. Louisiana's incarceration rate is almost six times Maine's and seven times China's.

This is no accident. A confluence of political and economic factors has made Louisiana what it is, as the Times-Picayune, New Orleans's daily newspaper, showed in painstaking detail in a recent eight-day series called “Louisiana Incarcerated”.

Some of those factors are obvious. Louisiana is poor, and has a high crime rate. Violent crime is particularly common. Its citizens, meanwhile, are politically conservative and tend to favour harsh punishment for wrongdoers. Sentencing laws have become steadily more ferocious.

But that is true of several states. What really makes Louisiana stand out is that it has built a system that pays local sheriffs to lock people up, making reform almost impossible. Louisiana's experience should be closely studied in California, as that state embarks on its new plan to farm imprisonment out to local officials.

As in California last year, federal judges ruled in the 1970s that Louisiana's prisons were so overcrowded that they violated the federal constitution. The state sought to cure the problem by encouraging local sheriffs to build more cells, in part by promising that a certain portion of them would be filled. That set off a building boom. Today—to a degree unprecedented in America—the system relies heavily on those sheriffs to house and feed convicts.

In most states, the vast majority of people convicted of crimes are sent to state-run prisons. In Louisiana 52% of prisoners while away their time in local jails, typically run by rural sheriffs. That is ten times the national average.

This matters because the state pays the local jailers, as well as a handful of private prison operators, just $24.39 a day for each inmate in their care. That is less than half what Louisiana spends on inmates in state-run prisons, and it is barely a third of what even relatively poor states like West Virginia spend.

And even that paltry amount of money is not all spent on prisoner care. The only way Louisiana's local sheriffs and private-prison operators can make a profit on the per-diem payment is to skimp on costs. This means bad food, limited supervision and no vocational programmes. For a sheriff, that money is more usefully spent on more deputies, higher salaries and better equipment. Tiny Richland Parish, in the north of the state, had 60 sheriff's deputies before the prison gold rush. Today there are 160, not to mention new shotguns, cars and bulletproof gear.

Prisoners have not fared well. One of the cruellest ironies of Louisiana's prison system is that the state jails—which tend to house people serving lengthy sentences—do much more to prepare inmates for life outside. But a man serving a ten-year stretch is apt to cool his heels in a local jail, with nothing offered in the way of rehabilitation. He will get out with $10, a bus ticket, and not much else. The chances are that he will resume his life of crime. And somewhere in Louisiana, a sheriff will smile.